Are we able to take anything significant away from this data? I might be a bit thick but I'm not getting all this talk on "flattening the curve". Would this not be achievable for any Government by increasing / maintaining the daily test limit per day or/and testing people from different areas / environments i.e. (hospitals, care homes or in people's houses) etc? The concept looks open to manipulation or basic probability i.e. the more tests you do the more positives you will likely see, the equal number of tests per day will likely mean no increase from the previous day

Matthew I'll take this on. I'm a medic in the UK. Although I'm not an intensivist I work in an allied specialty and frequently I'm in intensive care. The first graph shows the reduction in footfall at 17 stations in the UK as a proxy for reduced contacts. In Europe a number of metrics have been used to measure reduced contacts.

The second graph is number of new cases identified per day in the UK. This is about 5000 cases at the moment and does not seem to be rising - hence flattening the curve. If the new case rate per day remains 5000 the curve of the graph becomes a horizontal flat line. It is most worrying to see this rising. It has been shown that the average Covid patient spreads the virus to 2.5 other people. If those people spread to another 2.5 people each, in a month 400 are affected and in 2 months 160,000 are affected. If social contacts are halved each Covid patient might spread the virus to 1.25 people each, resulting in 15 new cases after a month and 225 cases after 2 months. The goal in a pandemic is to get the existing infections causing less than one new infection each. That way the disease declines and dies out as it has nowhere to go. At the moment the data suggests that in the UK that at the very most we are at a state of an existing infection causing only one new infection. Once the new infection rate is stable, then the death rate per day will stop going up but there will be a delay of possibly a couple of weeks before that happens

Regarding testing, in the UK for weeks testing capacity has only allowed those being admitted to hospital to be tested and we have been able to fulfil that consistently. So testing policy has been consistent. In recent days healthcare workers who are sidelined with suspect Covid symptoms have started to be tested as testing capacity has increased. Despite that the number of cases has not increased even though we are diagnosing Covid positive healthcare workers. It's therefore possible that the number of new cases may be starting to fall since we are testing more people and the number of positives is stable.

The third graph shows the number of hospital beds being occupied by Covid patients in different regions. You can see numbers still rising but the curves are getting flatter as the rate of new infections stabilizes.

At the end she alludes to critical care. There are normally just over 4000 critical care beds in the UK operating at about 80% capacity. Up to 4 April 2249 Covid patients had been admitted to ICU in the UK with about 1600 still there on 4 April. That's 40% of the country's capacity and remember there's normally 80% occupancy for other conditions. 80% + 40%=? Therefore extra critical care beds created and ICUs in London especially are very stretched. If there is exponential growth in infections or no flattening of the curve, then the system reaches capacity and breaks. The British government calculated that if they just let the virus run through the population ICU capacity would be exceeded by a factor of 8 with obvious consequences of thousands of preventable deaths.

Here are some statistics that you have not addressed: COVID19 Factors We Should Consider
This is going to be a blow, so get ready: Not everybody lives in NYC, and not everybody cares about NYC they way they care about where they live -- that seems wrong to you, doesn't it?

If I understand correctly, you're pointing to hospitals being underused -- and hence operations being cancelled etc -- in places like WF?

Well, this is going to be a blow, so get ready: I actually don't think all interventions -- especially in the US -- have been designed and implemented sensibly. For example, I think somebody pointed out their tiny gym was forced to close while the Target next door was open. That's stupid (Target should be closed). And perhaps some rural hospitals could have continued to provide some services for longer. But, with respect to hospitals, specifically: (a) neither you nor I have the expertise to weigh in on that with any credibility, since there are lots of difficult considerations that need to be balanced; (b) the inevitable screw-ups involved in an intervention this significant don't automatically mean the intervention itself is wrong or unecessary. And I'm not at all trying to say those screw-ups can't have seriously bad consequences. I know they can.

Originally Posted by Mark Rippetoe

And since you've been gone, we've been dealing with the inadequacies in the data over several pages, and yet I have to read about how I evade the issue of the piled-up bodies in New York City.

What on Earth are you talking about? In NYC, the number of COVID-19-related deaths currently stands at over 300 deaths per day. So that's well over 2000 deaths per week. As I've noted before (and provided a reference for), the typical number of deaths per week in NYC is around 1000 -- from all causes. So even if you thought that *all* "normal" deaths are mislabelled with COVID-19 right now, and even if you really think the outbreak is currently peaking, the number of deaths in NYC is *at least doubling* as a direct result of COVID-19.

Originally Posted by Mark Rippetoe

And still you're not being deleted, even though I thirst for your blood.

I can tell. For a libertarian, you are remarkably annoyed by dissent. Or is it just annoyance that your claims and links are actually being vetted?

For what it’s worth, I practice intensive care medicine in an epicenter. It is a very scary disease in that it can kill people very quickly and there is relatively little that can be done to stop the severe cases. I have seen it first hand and it is by far the scariest shit I have ever seen, and I have seen bad stuff. That said, my current feeling is that if you have it bad you die with a very high likelihood. And if there is a ventilator, you just die with a ventilator. I am not sure torching our economy was worth it. And we will be in a depression regardless.

That raises a question that I have been pondering for a few days now: Are the hospitals actually able to help anyone?

It seems pretty clear to me that, outside of a few outliers, it is frail old people and others who were killing themselves anyway who are simply dying a bit early.

How many of these people pull through normally if they get pneumonia of a bad enough seasonal flu to head to the ER anyway?

The economy will not crash entirely on its own. No. And you know this because it did not crash in 2009.
...
12,470 2009 H1N1-related deaths [occurred bbetween April 2009 and 10 April 2010]
...
Let's say the death count is 60,000 in two weeks: was the destruction of the economy worth it?

Let me get this straight:

People did not freak out completely during an epidemic that -- without the need for any social interventions -- killed 12,000 people in one year.

Therefore they will clearly also not freak out during an epidemic that -- with massive social interventions in place -- will kill 60,000 people in one month.

That's.... interesting.

Originally Posted by Mark Rippetoe

And what happens next time we have a new bug? You haven't answered that question, although I remember asking it. If this response is the new normal protocol, what does the next 20 years look like?

Of course not. The picture that's already emerging internationally is that the correct response is that which places like South Korea and New Zealand have deployed: drastic early and immediate interventions with massive testing, quarantining and contact tracing. Their examples seems to show -- so far at least -- that these responses allow early suppression, following which normality can be restored much earlier and without nearly as much economic damage.

If I didn’t have to go to work my essential job I definitely wouldn’t if it wouldn’t cost me my job. The post office will absolutely never be shut down for any reason whatsoever. I feel for all private business owners that spent their whole life acquiring prosperity on their own however it is very dangerous to be working right now or out and about for anybody.